by Shane Carrow
“Maybe we can swim,” Matt said. “Leave the guns, strip off, and swim.”
“That’s got to be twenty or thirty kays,” I said. “No way we can swim that far. It’ll be freezing, the sun’s about to go down.”
“We could take life buoys,” Matt said. “There’s got to be life vests, at least?”
“I’m not fucking taking a life vest and paddling thirty kays through the Bight,” I said. “At dusk. In great white shark territory.”
“Life vests,” Matt repeated, looking at Declan. “Where would they be?”
The navigator was only half listening, still holding the empty shotgun in both hands as though it was a foreign object, looking off down the railing. “No,” he said. “Better idea. If your mates are going to come back – we can drop the anchors. Stop the drift.”
“Okay,” Matt said. “Where are they?”
“At the bow.”
“Okay, good. That sounds good. Come on!”
We started making our way up the starboard railing, towards the front of the ship. More zombies were coming – some far behind us, others moving out of the jumble of containers. We shot them as we went – there was enough space out here that it didn’t feel quite as panicky as inside the superstructure, although having a monster shriek and stride towards you is never exactly a soothing experience. “Why didn’t you drop the anchors in the first place?” I asked as we went.
“We were underway, heading for Kangaroo Island,” Declan said. “When people got sick, after Albany – it happened so quickly, we didn’t have a chance to prepare or anything…”
I wondered if any of the other crew had survived; or even any of the rest of the landing party from Eucla, others like us who’d been split up and left behind and hadn’t taken the boats. If we got the anchors down, maybe we’d find out.
The containers at the bow had suffered worse than the rest – scattered and toppled all over the place, some leaning against each other. The starboard railing was ruptured and torn where some must have gone right overboard. If a storm blew up I could easily see more of them going over. There was an uneasy creaking sound of metal under pressure. “What’s the ship even carrying?” I asked Declan, as we ducked and scrambled beneath some of the tilted containers. It’d be a laugh if after all we’d gone through it turned out to be carrying ten thousand tonnes of drinking straws or something.
“What do you mean?”
“He means, what’s in the containers?” Matt said.
“Everything,” Declan said. “Anything and everything. It was an import run from Rotterdam. That’s what we were unloading in Perth. Then we were meant to be taking Australian cargo on to Singapore.”
“Is there food?”
“Maybe. I s’pose. Machinery, textiles, chemicals… all kinds of stuff. Not going to do you any good when the ship’s swarming with these fucking monsters, is it?”
“How many did you say? A hundred?”
“About that. What difference does it make?”
I wasn’t about to tell him, especially since we were nearly at the bow. I could see things from his perspective, not having set foot on dry land over the past four months, while civilization all over the globe collapsed into hell. I could see how it must have felt for his safe, secure floating fortress to suddenly be contaminated with the undead. I could see why he used the word “swarming.”
But a hundred zombies on a vessel this size… it’s not lost to us yet.
That was in the future. For now, we had stop the Maersk – and ourselves – from drifting off into the Bight.
The bow of the ship was a curved deck with machinery housing arranged across it: pumps, lines, and the anchor units. There were two of them, one port and on starboard. “What do we do?” Matt asked.
“I can do it myself,” Declan said. “Just watch my back, okay?”
The sun was touching the horizon now, the ocean turning golden orange, the long shadow of the superstructure looming all the way up to the bow. There were moans coming from further down the ship, drifting on the wind, through the darkness between the containers. Matt moved up and down the edge of them, peering through the gaps, checking along the port and starboard walkways. I stayed closer to Declan, who was working various cranks to take the housing off the anchor mechanism. Occasionally Matt would raise the Steyr and fire off a round, the crack of the gunshot rolling out across the water.
A zombie came stumbling up from starboard while Matt was on the port side, and I carefully raised the Glock and shot it through the head. About a hundred refugees, Declan had said. What could the crew have been – another two dozen? Matt and I alone had already killed maybe ten in the superstructure, and Stephen Heller must have taken out another half dozen – let alone the ones that had been killed up on the bridge. What about the refugees, the survivors? If they’d come on at Albany they must have seen a thing or two by then, some of them might have been armed, some of them surely would have gone down fighting.
There was a metallic groaning, a loud rattle, and suddenly one of the anchor chains was rattling away, feeding through its hole in the deck. “That’s one,” Declan grunted.
“Hey, Aaron, need a hand,” Matt yelled from port.
I ran over to him. Coming down the port walkway were a good dozen zombies, not even fifty metres away. Matt had dropped to one knee, resting the Steyr on some waist-high pump mechanism, carefully lining up his shots. I wasn’t sure how much ammo he had left. As the zombies got closer I aimed the Glock, squeezed one eye closed and took headshots as carefully as I could.
Still, some missed. Every bullet that whined off through the air, ricocheting off the containers or arcing out over the railing to plop into the ocean kilometres away, felt like I’d tossed away something precious. “How many rounds you got left?” I asked Matt.
Before he could check, there was a scream from Declan, and my blood ran cold. Both of us whirled around to see a zombie lurching across the deck towards him. Matt raised his rifle but it was between him and us, he couldn’t take a safe shot. I was already running.
Declan had dropped the empty shotgun but he picked it up now, holding it like a club between him and the advancing zombie. He was screaming something that was blown away from me by the wind – “stay back,” or something like that – but as it came towards him with its arms outstretched, he swung the shotgun and knocked it in the chest, sending it spinning backwards. It lost balance, fell to the deck, and before it could get back up I put a bullet through its head.
“Jesus Christ, you were supposed to be watching my back!” Declan yelled, gasping for breath.
“Sorry,” I breathed. “Listen, man –these things are dead, okay? They’re dead. Don’t try to talk to them, don’t try to reason with them. They can’t hear you, they don’t understand. Either try to kill them, or get away from them. Don’t hesitate.”
“Easy for you to say,” Declan said, dropping the empty shotgun on the deck. “That was Angelo. That was fucking Angelo. He was my friend.”
He went back to working on the second anchor. I peered down at the zombie. It was a man, wearing what had once been a blue jumpsuit before it had been torn apart and coated with blood and viscera. He’d been a crewmember.
Over by the containers, Matt was shooting more encroaching zombies. I checked the Glock. It was dry; I’d killed the crewmember with the final bullet. I took it out and replaced it with my only other fresh clip. Apart from that I had Stephen’s revolver with four rounds. Then it was just whatever Matt had left in the Steyr and his own revolver. “How much longer…” I was about to say, but the anchor answered me itself: another loud rattling, the whizzing of a crank handle spinning freely, and the chain unspooling as it fed down into the dark water below.
“That’s it,” Declan said, wiping sweat off his forehead. “Now what?”
I didn’t have time to answer him. Matt was shouting and swearing, falling back from the port walkway; he’d slung the Steyr over his back and drawn his revolver, levelling shot
s at the zombies that even now I could see coming around the corner of the containers. It wasn’t a horde, it was only another half dozen or so – but we were running low on ammunition, and all things considered the bow was a pretty small space.
“This way!” I yelled, grabbing Declan by the shoulder. We made for the starboard walkway, Matt not far behind us, and were maybe a third of the way down the side of the ship when we saw more zombies coming the other way to meet us. “Fuck,” Matt hissed. “I’m down to three bullets!”
We turned back towards the bow – another four or five zombies had followed us round, shuffling through, cutting us off. Ocean on one side, a wall of containers on the other.
But not a sheer wall. There was a point further up, like we’d seen this morning, where it was only one container high. We could climb that – if we could close the distance. “Come on!” I yelled, and we ran. I went ahead – I had more ammo now – and levelled my gun at the group, opening fire, taking some headshots while other bullets slapped uselessly into the dead flesh of their chests and shoulders. Behind me, Declan and Matt were scrambling up onto the container. “Aaron, come on!” I heard Matt scream.
The Glock ran dry; there were still five or six zombies marching towards me, only a few paces away. I shoved the gun in its holster, turned around, and felt my stomach drop as I saw just how close the undead from the bow were – only another ten metres. But Matt and Declan were above me, leaning down with hands outstretched, and they grabbed me by the wrists and hauled me up on to the container.
The three of us sat there for a moment, exhausted, panting for breath, while the undead scratched and clawed at the steel of the shipping container. The last light of the day had emblazoned the highest clouds a peachy pink, but the ocean around us was inky, and the sky was slowly darkening. We’re in for a long night. But at least we’re alive, and at least the ship isn’t drifting any further from land.
8.30pm
Our one-storey shipping container level is a dead end. It goes a few more containers into the stack, but is surrounded on all sides by three-storey stacks, if you get what I mean. And two levels is too high for us to climb. So we’re stranded.
Well. Not quite. There are eight zombies down below, at the same point where we scrambled up. I still have five bullets for the Glock, and four for Stephen’s revolver. Matt has three left for his own revolver.
Assuming we got a perfect headshot every time, that would leave us with four bullets. But if we kill them, what next? We’re not particularly keen to go back down on the deck – it’s safer up here – and we’re pretty much waiting for a rescue party anyway. Matt floated the idea of going back to the superstructure so we could at least sleep in beds overnight, but cornering ourselves in cabins again doesn’t seem prudent.
In the meantime we’ve cracked the local containers open. I’d assumed they’d be locked shut or something, but it’s just a basic bolt mechanism – Declan says there’s security at ports and stuff anyway, and they needed to be accessible for customs and OHS checks. In our little first-tier cove there’s four that we could access.
It was a weird feeling. Even with the blood and the horror we’d been through, even being stranded on a container ship of zombies thirty kays from home, it was undeniably exciting. Felt like opening presents on Christmas morning.
The first one was a disappointment. Endless stacks of cardboard boxes, which when we opened them up turned out to be full of food additives and colouring – big bottles of industrial level stuff, the kind of thing that gets listed as EMULSIFIER 402 or whatever at the arse-end of an ingredients label on a finished product. Nothing we could actually eat.
The second one was worse – various stacks of plastic-wrapped industrial equipment which, from what I could puzzle out in the German writing, seemed to be for railways.
“This is not how I thought this would go,” Matt said.
“I told you,” Declan said. “We ship everything.”
The third container, at least, had something immediately recognisable in it: a single car, a vintage Lamborghini, lime green, from somewhere in the 1960s. “Ha, okay, this is all right,” Matt laughed. The doors were unlocked, and he slipped into the plush leather of the driver’s seat, resting his hands on the steering wheel.
“This would’ve been a private transport,” Declan said. “There’s big roll on, roll off ships for dedicated car shipping.”
“Where’s it from?” I said, looking at the little EU numberplate with the letter L below the stars. “What’s that, Latvia?”
“Luxembourg, I think,” Declan said.
“That can’t be a country,” Matt said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s a country,” I said.
“What was an Italian car doing in Luxembourg, then?”
“Are you…” I said. “Are you serious? You think everyone just drives cars from their country? You drove a Hyundai!”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “Hyundai’s Australian, isn’t it?”
“You’re joking,” I said. “How the fuck do you know that Lamborghini is Italian but not that Hyundai is Korean?”
“Well, who cares about Hyundai?”
“Oh, come on,” I said. But our argument was cut short - Declan was already opening the fourth and final container, and I’d heard him cry out in delight.
Tomatoes. An entire shipping container packed full of Annalisa diced Italian tomatoes – and best of all, they were ring pull. Slurping cold tomatoes out of the can might not sound like a good meal; but as I’ve found all too many times this year, when you haven’t had anything to eat for a day, tinned vegetables are manna from heaven.
I have to say that when I woke up this morning I didn’t expect my day to end with me and Matt and an Irish bloke we just met, sitting in a 1960s Lamborghini in a shipping container eating chopped tomatoes straight out of the tin. Twelve hours ago…
Twelve hours ago I was sitting on the porch of the Amber Hotel in pre-dawn light, arguing with Matt about the dream we had. That beautiful dream. Matt’s scared of it, he hates it, I can tell that. But he’ll come around.
And all of this is connected. It must be. The day that we have that dream, the day we learn we have to travel east, a ship floats up at Eucla’s doorstep? That’s not coincidence. That’s fate.
May 2
3.00am
We set up a watch – not for danger, exactly, but in case a rescue party arrived and we had to call out for help – and Matt woke me up at 2.00am. I’d been sleeping in the back seat of the Lamborghini, Declan in the passenger seat. Matt took my place (“Nothing going on,” he said) and I went to go sit by the edge of our little container cove, as I’ve come to think of it, listening to the low-key muttering of the zombies down below, and looking at the light of the crescent moon sparkling off the water. Most of the clouds from yesterday had cleared, and the sky was perfectly calm.
Putting the anchors down had flipped the Maersk around – the current had been pulling it east, but we dropped the anchors at the bow, so it had slowly turned and now faces west. So we can see Eucla from the starboard side now, which is the side our little shelf of safety is on. By the time Matt had woken me up the streetlights would have cut off – they do that every night at nine – but I could still see a few faint lights on the beach. Flashlights, or maybe they brought a few Tilley lamps down. There are people there. They haven’t forgotten about us. They’re watching us. If we had a flare I’d set it off.
This ship isn’t going anywhere any more. Both those boats ended up back at Eucla. They have to come find us. Even if they think we’re all dead now, when they realise the ship isn’t drifting, they must realise somebody put the anchors down.
7.30am
I drifted off sometime in the night, sitting there with my back up against a container, hands tucked into my armpits for warmth. I’m not proud of it, but I was exhausted, and anyway it wasn’t exactly the same as falling asleep on watch back on the Nullarbor.
I was woken at dawn by
a droning noise. At first I wasn’t sure where I was. Then I remembered everything that had happened, and even in my foggy half-asleep state I realized what the sound was. I jumped to my feet and searched the sky…
And there it was, the Beechcraft, coming in low over the Maersk with the rising sun glinting off the cockpit. I jumped up and down, waving and screaming, hoping Len and whoever else was on board had seen me. The plane swooped overhead – Matt and Declan were awake as well, now, and stumbled out to join me, waving and shouting.
The plane banked, circled, made a couple more passes. There was no indication they’d seen us, but then I wasn’t exactly sure how they could let us know. Soon it disappeared, heading back towards Eucla.
“That’s good,” I said. “That’s a good thing. They know we’re here.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “The question is, what are they gonna do about it?”
12.30pm
A few hours after the plane came over, we heard gunfire – near and yet distant, the sound echoing around the containers, but clearly coming from the port side, where the rope ladder was. “Shit,” Matt said. “That’s them, that’s gotta be them, come on!”
He went to the lip of the container, levelled his revolver at the zombies below and started firing. I joined him, using up the rest of the Glock’s clip, and passing him Stephen’s revolver when his went dry. By the time they were all down we had just a few bullets left.
But that didn’t seem to matter, not when we could hear all that gunfire from the other side of the ship. We jumped down onto the deck, ran along the walkway until we found a gap, and entered the shipping container maze.
It was disorienting at first – the rattle of gunfire bouncing around, distant calls and shouts and the moan of zombies – but then we shouted out ourselves, calling for help, and heard familiar voices calling our names. And then we came through the labyrinth of gigantic Lego blocks and came face to face with the rescue party.
Colin was there, and Jonas, and Simon, but that was all from the original landing party. There were other faces from Eucla: Alan, Felix, Anthony, other men and women I knew, ten of them in total, two boatloads. “Where’s Varley?” Matt said. “Where’s Geoff?”